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... ne was in trouble, she would ease over to the child and scan the test, looking for mistakes. When she found an error, she would quietly take her pencil, tap it beside the mistake, so that the child knew there was an error on the test and where the error was. Then the teacher would take the pencil and whack it on the kid's nose. (When you are taking a test, Do make a mistake, Get a rap on the nose). Certainly an excellent application of the reinforcement paradigm and I would have to give it an "A" for correctness and an "F" for effectiveness. While Reinforcement Theory is a powerful influence tool, it does have several serious limitations.
To use it effectively, you must be aware of these difficulties in application. 1. It is difficult to identify rewards and punishments. As noted earlier in this chapter, reinforcers are identified by their function. Thus, there is no cookbook list of Rewards and Punishments.
Candy increases student cooperation, but has no value as payment to a factory worker. Thus, you have to observe your students very carefully to discover the things they find most rewarding or punishing. (See the coach example above. ) And once you do find things that function effectively, you can be seriously disappointed to discover that they lose their value over time. As the students become accustomed to receiving some Reward (say candy or stickers), they may grow bored over time. This is perhaps the greatest challenge for any teacher. Finding good Rewards and Punishments requires a great deal of experience and insight. 2. You must control all sources of reinforcement.
Teachers often must compete with the student's peer group. Peers provide an extremely important source of reinforcement, sometimes greater than any Reward or Punishment a teacher can give. The child's parents and family are another source of reinforcement. Teachers sometimes think their reinforcement applications are failing because the teacher is not using the "right" Reward or Punishment. Instead the problem may be that the student wants or needs the reinforcers the peer group offers more than the ones the teacher gives. 3. Internal changes can be difficult to create.
One side effect of reinforcement theory is that children learn to perform behaviors we want them to show only when the Get is available. If the Reward is not present, then the child will not show cooperation or good effort or attention or friendliness. The child becomes little more than a well-trained monkey who does a trick, then holds out a hand waiting for the banana. The child has not internalized the behavior but instead requires the full process (When Do-Get). This means that the teacher must always be running around providing the correct consequences for the desired behaviors at the right time.
In such an instance one wonders who is being trained, the teacher or the student. You should also realize that reinforcement works best with the heuristic thinker ("If I get a Reward, then the thing is good. If I get a Punishment, then the thing is bad. "). It does not require systematic thinking. As we discovered in the Dual Process chapter, influence with heuristic thinkers is often short lived and usually situation dependent. The influence lasts only as long as the cue (in this case the Reward or the Punishment) is available.
This simply means you need to maintain a steady diet of reinforcement cues to maintain the actions you desire. 4. Punishing is difficult to do well. Punishment is an extremely powerful consequence for all living things. Whether it is a monkey, a pigeon, a child, or an adult, punishing consequences can produce extremely rapid, strong, and memorable changes. The problem is that effective punishment demands certain requirements. The research clearly shows that effective punishment must be: 1) immediate (right now! ), 2) intense (the biggest possible stick), 3) unavoidable (there is no escape), and 4) consistent (every time).
If you cannot deliver punishment under these conditions, then the punishment is likely to fail. Thus, the best punishment would be something like this. A kid does the Bad Thing, then: the kid is instantly placed in a dark room filled with snakes and bugs and jungly vines while weird and frightening voices shriek, "Don't do the Bad Thing, Don't do the Bad Thing. " And as soon as the kid stops doing the Bad Thing, bang, the kid is back in class, safe and sound. While this example is an exaggeration, you get the point. We know that most principals, almost all school boards, and all parents would be against this kind of punishment.
Therefore, one of the most powerful aspects of reinforcement is effectively taken away from the teacher. Yet, some teachers persist in using weakened forms of punishment, often with unsuccessful and frustrating effects. 5. Students may come to hate teachers who use punishment. Punishment is, by definition, an aversive, painful consequence.
People experience very negative emotional states when they get punished. And, as we learned in the Classical Conditioning chapter, it is very easy to condition emotions. Thus, when a teacher uses punishment, the students will probably feel angry or fearful or hopeless and they will then connect or associate these negative feelings with the source of the punishment, the teacher. This is not a good state of affairs. As a teacher you want to use influence tools to accomplish important learning goals. If the influence tool produces negative affect for the teacher, the teacher is essentially shooting herself in the foot.
Sure, the punishment helps accomplish one goal, but at the same time the punishment is making other goals more difficult to achieve. 6. It is easy to reinforce one pigeon, but a whole flock? Reinforcement theory has been most strongly tested with animals, particularly pigeons. And that research with pigeons has yielded outstanding results. The problem for teachers is this: The research used reinforcement principles on one pigeon at a time. Teachers teach a whole flock.
The sheer size of a classroom brings a very difficult dimension into the proper application of reinforcement theory. This model is simple and widely applicable. It is also probably the one influence tool that almost every teacher knows. Given the discussion of the limitations of reinforcement theory, you should realize that it is not the Swiss Army Knife of persuasion that can be ingeniously applied anytime anywhere with anyone. In fact, I believe that it is used too often by teachers and typically under the wrong conditions.
Please understand that reinforcement theory will work marvelously when it is properly employed. Under the correct conditions, monkeys and pigeons, boys and girls, and men and women will be strongly influenced through the skillful use of reinforcement principles. What are those correct conditions? Here's the list: 1. The source is well-trained in the theory and practice of reinforcement. 2. The source has complete control of all significant reinforcers for all receivers. 3.
The source has complete control of each receiver (i. e. what the receiver does, when the receiver does it, what other receivers are in the situation). 4. The source has a detailed and consistent plan of reinforcement. 5. The reinforcers are always delivered under the same conditions to each different receiver. To the extent that you deviate from these general rules, the application of reinforcement will be ineffective.
It is also important to realize that these inefficiencies do not make the theory a failure, but rather these inefficiencies simply show it is difficult to implement the theory in the classroom. Hill, W. (1985). Learning: A survey of psychological interpretations. (4 th. Ed. ). New York: Harper and Row. Skinner, B. (1953).
Science and human behavior. New York: MacMillan. Skinner, B. (1968). The technology of teaching.
New York: Appleton Crofts. Updated September 15, 1996; Copyright SBB, 1996 Bibliography:
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